Kitty Leroy – Lady Gambler & Gunfighter

Drawing by Wane Guard in story about Kitty Leroy. Image from Genealogy Images of History.

A gunfighter, gambler, performer, and alleged prostitute, Kitty Leroy, born in 1850, was best known as one of the most proficient poker players in the Old West. Thought to have been from Michigan, she was performing as a dancer by the age of ten and as she got older, began to work in dancehalls and saloons, where she picked up a number of other skills, specifically proficiency with weapons and at games of chance.

When she married her first husband, legend has it that he was the only man in town with the nerve to let her shoot apples off his head. But, Kitty was restless and wanting to take her “show” on the road, she headed to Texas, leaving her husband behind.

By the age of 20, she was said to have been one of the most popular entertainers in Dallas, but soon gave up dancing to become a faro dealer and was noted for never going to the faro tables without several knives and revolvers.

Her skills with weapons and gambling proficiency became legendary as well as her mode of dress which ranged from dressing like a man to extravagant gypsy-like attire. While in Texas, she acquired a second husband and the two soon headed to California.

A third marriage apparently took place somewhere along the line, a man that she was said to have married as a result of a guilty conscience. In this incident, the story tells us that when the man became too ardent in his affections for her, she challenged him to a fight. When he refused to fight a woman, she donned men’s clothing and challenged him again. She then allegedly shot him and as he lay wounded, called for a preacher and married him before he died.

She soon opened the Mint Gambling Saloon, where she met her fourth husband, a German prospector who made a rich gold strike. However, when the German’s gold ran out, so did Kitty’s interest. She was then said to have hit him over the head with a bottle, before kicking him out of their home and her life.

On June 11, 1877, Kitty married her fifth husband, a man named Samuel R. Curley in Deadwood. But, for Kitty, this would be a fatal mistake. Curley was a jealous man and after numerous arguments over alleged affairs with a former husband, and others such as Wild Bill Hickok and Sam Bass, he killed her on December 7, 1877 in the Lone Star Saloon before turning the gun on himself. The following day, the townspeople allegedly laid out the pair for viewing inside the saloon before they were buried together.

A journalist would later say of the 28 year-old, that she “had five husbands, seven revolvers, a dozen Bowie knives, and [was] always went armed to the teeth.”

There is no evidence that Kitty was actually a prostitute, but as many of the Deadwood saloons offered those “services,” she may very well have been a “madam.”

She obviously had a daughter somewhere along the line, as Deadwood newspapers of the time indicate that her estate was left to her daughter.